Chapter 75
REND
Stop. Take a moment, a breath. Watch this horror unfold once again.
Slide back in time to the moment where Skinpainter feels Belltoller die, a ripping like shorn cloth as she’s torn from the world.
An acid edge to the air and then, gone. Skinpainter knows that behind them her body is falling.
Absently, they hear voices, screams. But there is no time to linger, no space to give to grief.
The sky is wide and swallowing. The wreck of the storm they summoned lists over the Barrowlands, falling apart as the guiding mind of the Belltoller dissolves into nothing.
The wind drops, gusts, tears at Skinpainter’s ribbons, at red and yellow robes burnt to blackness from calling down the lightning.
Their tendons underneath lit with fire, fraying as surely as the last scraps of material wound around their straining arms. They spit.
This body is a tool, and they’ll use it until it breaks, if needed.
The alternative is unthinkable. Crowkisser cannot win.
The mountain cannot be breached. They tighten their grip, grit their teeth against the aches blossoming under their skin and spread broad hands across the shifting sky, to paint it red and black and red again.
Geometries opening pathways for the lightning, luring it to the ground along thrown angles, like water down a rill.
That bitch had lied to them. She had come with a soft face and wide-eyes and lied to them.
They’d known she would bring death, and she’s brought it by the score.
They haven’t seen so much blood in years.
All across the Barrowlands, people they love die.
Crowkisser was stronger than she had any right to be.
The kind of power that flowed out of her shouldn’t be possible.
It had an alien feel to it, something damp and yearning.
And strong. Crowkisser had met them, breath for breath, spell for spell, and the battle had turned into something worse.
A clash of wills, like the old days. The bodies below were barely human anymore.
Just a way to keep score. It turned their stomach.
By any count, both sides were losing, the Barrowlands thick with slaughter.
It was dangerous, this butchery, ringing out like a bell to the ancient dead of the Empire.
Each cut brought them closer to catastrophe, like slaking a dog’s mouth with blood and expecting it not to bite.
Absently, Skinpainter watches lightning sear the flesh from another huddle of grey-cloaked wretches.
It’s too late now. This isn’t the war they’ve chosen, but it’s the war they’re in. There are two options – fight, or die.
At their back, they feel Shroudweaver begin to work, that old familiar pluck and tug, like a nail under a scab.
They send lightning down, buying him time for whatever he has planned.
Their heart races. The mountain hums along with their sorcery, the angles in its slopes resonating with the geometries.
The air grows thick with the cold feel of ritual magic, like ducking slowly under dark water.
They’ve never really understood weaving.
Never really understood the between, but they can feel it close to their skin, like a great lake on the other side of their lungs.
The dead shoal in its wetness, in hollows created by the weaver’s movement.
Skinpainter’s chest aches. Behind them, Shroudweaver staggers like a bar-room drunk. He exhales, and on the out-breath come the dead. Abruptly, Skinpainter is not alone; a feeling like a snapped twig, and the air suddenly full of spirits.
They turn in horror. Shroudweaver can’t even meet their eyes.
His whole mind is lost in the between. His body hangs limp in Shipwright’s arms, and flowing from it, the unbound souls of the Empire.
Skinpainter staggers against the invisible torrent of the dead, ethereal bodies brushing their face like feathers.
A thousand, thousand light-limned lives, swelling in murmuration, then arrowing down to where Crowkisser races towards the mountain.
An unbinding. An unbinding of the Emperor’s dead.
That’s what Shroud had proposed, bald-faced, and Skinpainter, fool that they were, had never paused to consider, what, exactly, that might look like.
For years, they had wondered how he had freed all the Empire’s bound souls.
A feat beyond reckoning. A feat that had won them the war.
And of course, the explanation, like all explanations, was simple.
The weaver hadn’t. He’d bound them. Swapped one cage for another. And kept it quiet for decades.
Skinpainter hadn’t pressed him on it when the pair had first arrived, far too concerned with keeping face with the entire mountain watching, but now they think about it, they’re furious.
At the betrayal. At the secrecy. At the sheer fucking idiot risk of it all.
It must show in their eyes, because Shipwright catches their gaze and flinches back protectively.
That’s all it takes. One small movement of fear.
Skinpainter shakes their head ruefully. This battle needs to be won.
There’ll be time for recrimination later.
It’s not like they don’t hold secrets of their own.
As the indignation fades, it dawns on them they have absolutely no clue how Shroudweaver’s planning to pull this off.
A small thread of curiosity pulls their gaze from Shipwright, from Shroudweaver’s senseless body, and towards the weaver’s work.
Excitement and terror lights in their heart.
Out on the Barrowlands, above the torn cairns, snapped flags and broken bodies, something forms. A bare space in front of Crowkisser’s charging feet, filled with drifting motes of gold, the dead souls of Empire gathered and spun into something far greater.
It’s at least thirty feet tall, or more.
Skinpainter struggles to look at it, to make sense of it.
The shapes of the dead within it move like fish under glass, and beyond them, the outline of something else.
Eyes liquid as the shifting deep, limbs swaying in drifting shoals.
It is beautiful. Terrible. Perfect. It stinks of spice and sweetness. God-magic. Their lip curls in disgust.
All around, the armies on the plain fall to their knees. Even on the battlements, Skinpainter can see soldiers staggering forwards for a glimpse, their jaws hanging slack with wonder.
Skinpainter feels a twitch under their ribs, and places a hand against their side as they run their eyes critically over the adoring crowds.
Like watching cattle at market. They look again at the abomination Shroudweaver has raised and feel nothing kind.
Too many short-sighted people always wanting to call something bigger, stronger.
Stupid. They sigh. At least this will be over soon.
It takes a second before Crowkisser stutters to a stop before the glowing monstrosity, pulling herself into shape from a squalling mess of feathers.
The edges of the flock becoming her edges, crows on crows that are suddenly thin limbs.
Skinpainter’s almost pleased to see her, so small and so human against this roiling blasphemy, her familiar outline stick-legged and black against the burning sun of the new god.
That empathy lasts for all of half a second, until Crowkisser raises a hand, and in her fingers, they see a small scrap of flesh and bone.
Skinpainter has a second to notice its absence among their trinkets.
A vertigo spike of panic. A slipped belt-loop.
A second to flash back to a moment of closeness, of touching, of betrayal.
A second more to see how the pieces of this puzzle fit together before they feel the pulse of its unveiling, feel it calling to them.
The Emperor’s finger. Rightmost hand, smallest digit.
Skinpainter’s learnt its shape over the years.
Watching it every night, using it to feel out the madness of its owner as he slowly choked down in the dark, his lungs filling with stone and blackness until he fell quiet.
The bone shivered every night at first, then every week.
Then perhaps every month or so. Eventually, it dwindled to nothing but a reassuring presence on their belt, never shuddering to life, so never noticed.
Skinpainter had learnt to live with it, as they’d learnt to live with all their other horrors.
Content to keep the Emperor forever separate from the dead.
And now, that grisly little memento is gone. Crowkisser has it.
Crowkisser winds back her arm and throws, the composite exploding even as the curse leaves Skinpainter’s lips.
The Emperor’s flesh touching the souls of the mountain’s dead for the first time in twenty years.
And as it does, somewhere in the depths, the rest of the Emperor awakens, and calls out.
Singing through the blood of everyone who once lived in the Empire.
Singing through the veins of their children and their children’s children.
Skinpainter staggers. Blood bubbles against their teeth.
Their flesh awakens, and in response the tattoos on their body blaze upon their skin.
The pain is incredible. But pain means it’s working.
Pain means the geometries hold. As long as the tattoos remain unbroken, the dead can’t get in; the Emperor can’t claim them.
They stagger again as below their feet the mountain blooms with acrid black smoke, and the great gate explodes.
Their heart sinks. A smaller, less bitter defeat.
More expected, more direct, but still deadly.
They’ve badly underestimated Crowkisser.
But she doesn’t know what they’ve survived.
She is young. Too young to understand that even suffering can be a weapon.